re: Alex Trebek has stage four pancreatic cancer

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last 4 years and spending many days and nights in Mary Bird

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If you were there in the last four years, it's highly unlikely we weren't there or in the cardiac unit together at some point.

My mom was tiny, maybe 4' 10, wiped out by 10 years of cancers. I was the 300lb gorilla standing next to her. The guy who shaved his head so the regulars would ask me WTF kind of chemo I was on. I was the one running behind her wheelchair to make her laugh and to make the nurses nervous.

I'm sure you saw the stage four ghost of a giant. The man who was 6'6 and read the same Hemingway book day after day while his wife sat next to him an cried. He had no strength to spare. He willed himself through that hell like Hemingway's plodding words.

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the majority of people I have been around would make you pick your teeth up after comments like that.

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They would laugh, or nervously laugh.

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Take your lighten the frick up lying arse elsewhere douchebag

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At least now I understand why you're a bitter prick.

Cancer may win the battle. It may decide whether someone you love lives or dies. But there is a choice to be made how to approach that moment.

My grandmother would have done anything to live. While it was clear she should have never started treatment... She did it anyways. My grandfather and sister went fast. They never really had a chance to see it.

My mom had cancer for years. 12 years. Chemo and radiation. 6 months of remission followed by six months of hell. Borrowed time. Each time she said she would not do treatment again. And each time she did. But where as the first breast cancer felt like a death sentence... She approached each new cancer with a larger and larger chip on her shoulder. It was admirable. She repeatedly looked death in the face and politely told him he could frick right off. She laughed. I have pictures of her standing on the beach. Wearing oxygen. Drinking liquid lydocaine mixed with liquid lortab to cope with the radiation burns. She's smiling and laughing.

When it became clear the last one was truly the last one, I remember her drinking a glass of wine and asking for a puff of a menthol cigarette while on oxygen. Because frick it. Her terms and no one else's. I remember her eating orange popsicles and cracking jokes in chemo. Making her nurses laugh. Making her doctors laugh.

I remember patients next to her asking for what she's having. Some wierd cancer ridden "when Harry met Sally" reimagining. I remember the bursts of laughter cutting through the muffled conversation. The first timers' families asking the nurses to please ask "the regulars" to be quiet.

Think what you will of me. Cope however you want.

But my advice to you, tuck your brittle knuckles back in your pockets.



ETA:

The cancer patients get to make the jokes. Not the family sitting next to them.

I'm not saying I'd make the final jeopardy joke, I'm saying I can see someone in the late stages saying it in a chemo fog and then laughing in that rustling paper sounding way that chemo makes your vocal chords into.

Damn Rando, that was the real deal.

Damn. That fricking sucks. Alex Trebek is a good guy.

I have my moments.

Trust me that kind of cancer is no joke

That is certain death. Prayers for him and his family. I hope that he is a Christian. Prayers are wasted if he isn't. Just the Truth.

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Take your lighten the frick up lying arse elsewhere douchebag.

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If you watched Alex's announcement, he makes a joke about having to host three more years of jeopardy or he breaks his contract.

Everyone deals differently

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My uncle had it. He lasted about 2 months from the time he was diagnosed. That shite's nearly unstoppable.

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Sorry to hear about your Uncle. I lost my Aunt to the same about 10 years ago.

FWIW, The Huntsman Cancer Center at the University of Utah has come up with a new treatment that is one of the more promising treatments to date.

LINK

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Final jeopardy

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